adding a line of tutorials for ipad and phone

The thick of paddling season is up on me here in sunny soWI. Algae blooms and weeds are in all the Madison lakes (I think) like usual, but my favorite lake near Cambridge is spring fed and it remains pure pleasure. If you're a local, Lake Ripley is a diamond in the rough, hidden away just a few minutes outside of Madison. Nice little beach and pleasant paddling. It's not wilderness, but it is swimmable and remarkably weed- and algae-free. The beach remains a favorite memory from our days as the parents of little kids. Back in the day, I would also ride to Cambridge in the early morning on Saturdays and then swim in the lake for my triathlon training. Good stuff. Still never managed a high finish though. I hated running then and still do now.....

On another note, we continue selling paddlesports DVDs on Amazon and to a lesser extent Createspace, but the world seems to be migrating away from DVDs. I know our household has. So I am porting all of our DVDs over to a video tutorial format that works nicely for phones and tablets. DVDS obviously do not work on those devices. So I'm thinking it might be time to get up to date as far as display devices go.

I am curious what the market might be for paddling instruction on these devices. I think the demographics are different, but I am unclear if that works in favor of paddle instruction topics or not. I would love to read your comments on moving to these new formats and devices!
thanks!
Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films

an Advanced Solo Canoeing DVD and Something New

Hi paddlers! A few years have slipped by since things started moving along here. The Solo Canoeing DVD was our first production back in the day. I think it's time to add to the collection a bit. I would like to do an Advanced Solo Canoeing DVD this spring/summer and I need your help convincing Darren Bush to hop in a canoe and paddle it in front of the camera again. Darren and the shop he owns, Rutabaga, remains one of the best paddling and canoe loving shops you'll find in the USA. Rutabaga puts on Canoecopia every year, which is the best paddlefest, canoefest, "spring into spring" event you'll find in the country! I hope you'll consider emailing the shop or possibly calling Rutabaga and letting Darren and the staff know you're interested! Or you might consider attending Canoecopia this spring and tell him in person :) Contact info is in the video. I didn't want to write that out in text in the blog....Even better take a drive to Madison and walk the aisles of the shop. It's an awesome place. He's usually there! I think Darren did a fabulous job teaching his craft in the first DVD. Every good thing thing deserves a followup right? Help me convince him!

PS - Times have changed. I would love to hear or read from those of you that would be interested in an online video series - in addition to a DVD. thanks all Jeff Bach Quietwater Media

Z is for Zoomify

Zoomify is a neat set of code snippets that make it easy to rotate something and show a 360° user-controlled view, or a view that can be zoomed in and out. Other options are available as well. Interesting stuff if you need to show a variety of different product views that show details and capture viewer interest.

Y is for Yarpha

Another tough letter for relevancy to Quietwater Films. I have to go back to the strange words source, but again I find some relevancy. Yarpha is a peatbog with sandy or fibrous peat. Just like all those I walked around the edges of in Minnesota as a kid growing outside of Duluth. Most of these peat bogs were little swamps, likely in a kettle carved out by a glacier. So you could walk around them, or at least the one in the front of our property. Yarphas are always cool and dark. You can feel the cold humidity even on the hottest summer day. The hardest thing about yarphas is walking in them. The spruce trees are densely packed. The branches are very stiff. Tough walking, especially when you can only see about six feet in front of you.

So there it is. Yarphas, a word sure to delight lovers of swamps. Enter at your own risk.

X is for xylopyrography

I thought X would be a tough letter for relevancy to Quietwater Films. I had to step out of bounds and use a source of unusual words. So I did. Xylopyrography is the art of engraving designs on wood with a poker. Basically this is wood burning, which I have done. It might even be relevant. My very first canoe paddle back when I was a mere lad is a one piece basswood number I made myself. I wood burned a set of wolf tracks up the middle of that paddle.

Now I know what to call it, when in polite company.

W is for Lake Waubesa

Lake Waubesa is one of the four lakes found around Madison. Kegonsa is the lake closest to me. It connects to Mud Lake and then Waubesa through a short segment of the Yahara River that is one of my favorite places to paddle.

Lake Farm County Park, A Dane County park, is on Lake Waubesa. I think it is one of the best kept secrets in Dane County.

V is for Vast

My childhood years were spent in Duluth, MN. For those of you that flyover the Midwest, Duluth is at the tip of Lake Superior. Trivially speaking, Duluth (and Minnesota) lay claim to the world's largest sandbar, aka Park Point. Thanks to the ongoing grinding of the hinterlands, occurring even now as I write, performed by the relatively unknown St. Louis River. Park Point is one expression of the river delta and estuary that the St. Louis has created as it empties into Lake Superior.

Back in the day when I was a mere lad, some would say prior to global warming, Lake Superior was too cold for swimming, unless you were a lake trout, or possibly a lamprey. Nonetheless my mother would take the three of us bored kids down the hill from our sunny house on the inland plateau and treat us to a day on the beach at Park Point. This beach was (and still is) huge and beautiful. Sometimes it was even warm, to the point where the hot sand would hurt your feet. So we would run to the water to cool our burning feet, which of course would immediately freeze our feet. So back we would go, to the hot sand which still hurt. Eventually we found a good middle ground standing on the wet sand at the strandline. At some point in our childhood we learned to wear shoes. Things were primitive back then, going barefoot still happened on occasion.

As a child in the 70s, a college student in the 80s, and a father in the 00s, standing on that Park Point beach and looking out over the lake taught me the meaning of "vast". That beach was the only place I've ever been, where I could watch a ship sink out of sight due to the curve of the earth and still have one foot on land and the other foot in fresh water. We're small, the planet is big. Lake Superior is simply vast.

U is for urban water

Here in my piece of flyover country, I am blessed with abundant water. As global change brings us closer to a water-based Armageddon, I'm thinking that I might have a shot at survival given all the water around me within just a few miles. I wonder if enough people are looking at the issue of water becoming a scarce resource for more people, especially those, like me, for whom water was once found in abundance. I think, in my remaining few years (hopefully more than that), that we are going to see water come to the forefront of critical issues for humanity. I really continue to wonder why we don't hear more about desalinization, even simply using solar energy to drive evaporation on a large scale to produce salt free water. For a great bulk of the planet, water remains such a plentiful commodity that it has not yet risen to the level of questioning its supply for our ongoing survival. That's changing day by day, but the change is so small and so local that we don't see it. Not yet and hopefully not ever.

That brings me to today's phrase, "urban water". Like this:

Aside from the many alarmist facets of this issue, urban water still can provide respite from the daily grind. Many of us dream about the week every year in which we "escape" to the Boundary Waters or some other watery spot in which we can paddle about and leave our worries behind. While that week in the BWCA remains high on the list of annual goals, I find the daily (or at least weekly) pleasure of getting out on urban water to be very much worthwhile. This can be a lifestyle thing, whereas the annual vacation is an exceptional thing. An hour of simply aimless wandering around on water in a boat, paddle in hand is a good thing. Even with skyscrapers in close proximity.

Sometimes, even as it comes ever closer to your daylight basement and the sliding glass door, water still provides the simple pleasure, or novelty, of paddling in your backyard.

T is for Tandem canoe

The workhorse of the canoe world. It requires team work for a pleasant and efficient trip. Putting two beginner paddlers into a tandem canoe can be a true test of friendship or marriage. What I admire about this style of boat is in relation to a rowing style of boat. As far as I know the facing forward canoe is a Native American invention. Europeans had only the facing backwards row boats. Big mighty civilized Europe could not or would not be bothered to develop a facing forward type of small boat? Meanwhile for who knows how long, the natives of North America were using it routinely?

S is for Simple

Probably the thing I like most about paddling is the simplicity. Effort equals movement. Relaxed effort equals a leisurely pace with time to see what around you. Strong effort delivers the workout and the focus on smaller world and optimal sustained effort. I like the concentration on perfect strokes and keeping a high rate in a straight line. Although it' not as simple, sometimes on my paddleboard I'll bring both canoe and SUP paddles. Short for sitting and tall for standing. Different everything between the paddles. I like this variety. What I like more than anything though is getting out on the water.

R is for Rivers

Where would lakes be without rivers? Empty for starters. Life here in the Midwest offers lots of both. Close to the house as well. The Yahara is my first paddling choice. Always upstream to start. To the island in Mud Lake, past the old pioneer bridge and the native fish weir then back downstream. Usually I have the place to myself both ways. Great water. Great paddling. When that's not enough lake Kegonsa looms large. I like sunrise paddling on that surface. Usually smooth, calm, and quiet. Unfortunately water skiers like the same conditions. It's still worth the wake up though.

Q is for Quiet

Quietwater Films has always been narrowly scoped into producing instructional DVDs. The meander that led to the name though is a distinct nod to the weirdness of media in outdoor recreation. Back in the day when Quietwater was getting organized, the paddling industry was commonly seen in the media as this collection of pink-haired mohawk-wearing kayakers doing something outlandish on some creek with some really bad really loud music underlying the whole show. It was as if the entire industry consisted of a bunch of nose ring wearing gomers frantically jamming themselves down some Cat. V river drop. I have to give them credit, at least someone was doing something to try and promote kayaking.

But I think there was a fundamental disconnect. The bulk of the paddling world was aging rapidly and spending time on lakes not whitewater rivers. The largest volume of new boats sold was in the recreational kayak category, not creek boats, not whitewater boats. It wasn't too long before fishing kayaks were one of the top sellers as well. But yet in the media, all you saw were stunts involving cliffs and pink hair. The industry just couldn't seem to pull its head out of its collective nether region and recognize where the money was and where their customers were. The gomers hucking themselves off cliffs were rotten customers. No money. No job, borrowed boats with an occasional sponsor boat. Very narrow appeal mainly to other broke couch surfing pink haired youngsters.

Not sure where the manufacturers were going with this line of thought other than out of business.

Anyway, Quietwater saw this somewhat pathetic environment. I did not want to play in it. Thankfully my partner at the time did not want to either. So we went off the opposite end of the spectrum. Quietwater is a name that represents our awareness of the REST of the paddling world. The quiet normal weekenders who get out in lakes with kids. The couple that get out for a paddle in their rec kayaks. Nothing Cat. V, no hair dye, no bad music.

As an aside, Mike Hooks, who I believe is still the Sales VP at Native Watercraft created several original pieces of what we called "swamp rock" as the score for two DVDs we did with Native Watercraft. Mike is a great guy and an outstanding musician. It used to be funny how many artistically gifted people ended up in sales. It's not funny anymore, the correlation has been consistently strong between artistically creative and sales for a long time now.

Quietwater is still around, still carrying the flag for normal people in normal boats having normal fun. Hair coloring is OK, bad music no. It's not all about ear throbbing adrenaline rushes. It's about time on quiet water too.

P is for paddling

Paddling has been the heart of Quietwater Films. It still is. Facing forward so you can see where you are going. Not where you have been. That's rowing. It also makes my neck hurt. Very european as well.

As with most things, paddling can be easy to learn, but harder to master. Most people get 80% of the sport in the first day. That final 20%, like so many other things is more subtle and, if you do not do it frequently, may be something you truly never master. that's OK though, even with 80%, you'll still have a great time on the water and that is what it's all about. Simple pleasure derived from a simple movement. Clarity. Peace of mind. All good.

O is for Olive Dun

The mayfly and its life cycle provides a good bit of flyfishing's raison d'etre as well as a good bit of its vocabulary.

Egg, nymph, subimago, and imago are the four stages that a mayfly goes through. "Dun" is another word for subimago. This mayfly, at the dun stage of its life, can fly, which it does from the water surface to a sheltered spot along the stream where its wings can dry and harden a bit. The wings sometimes have an olive tint to them at this stage. It is now an adult, but thought to be sexually immature. At some point shortly after surviving this flight from water to shelter, it sheds its skin one last time. This mayfly is now fully mature and is known as a spinner.

And there you have it, the sex life of bugs and the fish that eat them. It's a tough life.

N is for National Geographic

That girl with the eyes. I'll bet that is still what a bunch of people think when they see a National Geographic magazine. I do. Apparently the magazine itself still does as well, given that picture's presence all these years later in its current marketing media.

Just as cool as that image itself, taken in 1985 by the way, is the fact that the photographer spent a ton of his life afterwards looking for that girl. He found her years later, looking more like a world weary, war weary refugee, but her eyes were still there.

My favorite magazine. Compelling imagery being the leading reason.

M is for Minnesota

I live in Wisconsin, which is right next door to Minnesota. I grew up in Duluth, MN., up at the edge of Lake Superior, so I feel like I know the state halfway well. Like Wisconsin, Minnesota is in flyover country. I wonder if Minnesota is experiencing the same malaise that Wisconsin seems to be mucking through. With the two states side by side it's easy to compare them against each other. Which is recovering from recession? Which is offering better living conditions? The Wisconsin governor has the taint of closely attached big money outsiders. Does the MN governor have that as well? Maybe but that's not the feel I get from MN. Could be media coverage and consumption differences I guess. Could be that the Wisconsin governor is conservative and somehow just seems unable to add anything to inform change, whereas my perception of the Minnesota governor is that he is being more liberal and somehow vaguely seeming smarter and capable of change by adding something rather than change merely by removal which is the impression I have of the WI governor.

Which state has the healthier more vibrant big city? I would have to give that to Minnesota just by feel more or less. Personally, every time I have gone to Milwaukee, the WI big city, for work I have been impressed, but I've always gone to the suburbs and not the inner city. The inner city I think is where the differences are going to show up. Milwaukee seems to be more tragic and broken. Minneapolis/St. Paul not so much. Again maybe just media coverage.

L is for Louisiana

I was in Louisiana for a project in early 2009. January. Hurricane Katrina had roared through there in 2005 if memory serves. Four years +/-. Scenes like this boat tossed up on the road shoulder were still common place even with four years of time to clean up and recover. Even around New Orleans and Slidell, if you went more than a quarter mile off the freeway cloverleaf, you were right back in the devastation. It was sad. Amazing. Staggering. Easy to feel like you were in a third world country. Four years after the event. I wonder what it was like in the rural areas far from the public eye that the main freeway thoroughfares offered? It's ten years after the fact as I write this. I hope recovery has finally completed. It's not a third world country. I hope things are back to where they need to be......

K is for kayaking

Lots of ways to have fun in the water. Statistically speaking, recreational kayaking might be the most common way to get out in the water and enjoy some outside time. Short learning curve, minimal technique, especially if you are out on freshwater that's warm. Open ocean sea kayaking is a bit more involved, but still pretty close. Simple paddling, close to the water and fresh air. It's all good.

J is for Jimbo Meador

I like Jimbo. He is a quality individual. I've been lucky enough to work with him a couple different times. While he has gone on to other things, I still look back at the projects we did and the time we spent together with the fondest of memories.

Here is my favorite picture of the many I took in working with Jimbo We were out driving and happened to come across this little snapping turtle, if memory serves me correctly. It was a turtle rescue opportunity and we, my daughters, Jimbo and I, took it.

I is for Ipanema Beach

I is the first letter I have struggled with in this challenge. Until this point, each letter has led to a word with meaning to Quietwater Films. But I came up dry with "I". Somehow Ipanema Beach came to mind. The wonders of randomness.

So I went to my new buddy Wikipedia and found a surprise that at least makes (maybe) "I" more interesting. Ipanema Beach is this big fancy world famous beach in Rio do Janeiro, Brazil. I thought the name was Portugese and would have some important meaning.

Turns out that Ipanema is a native (Tupi) word that means "Stinky lake". I think it refers to the lake behind the beach.There you have it, the surprise for the day (to me anyway). Thinking that a beach that big and famous and exotic must have some important origin, only to find the opposite. Stinky Lake.